Fourth generation (4G) cellular networks employing newer radio access technology (RAT) systems that implement the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Long Term Evolution (LTE) and LTE Advanced (LTE-A) standards are rapidly being developed and deployed within the United States and abroad. In many wireless communication networks, including networks implementing LTE and LTE-A radio access technologies (RATs), wireless communication devices decode control information of various wide-band communication channels, such as the physical downlink control channel (PDCCH) that is communicated using particular orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) symbols within each subframe of a transmission frame. Control information carried in the PDCCH is referred to as downlink control information (DCI). The DCI may include downlink (DL) grant/assignment information (e.g., resource allocations for the physical downlink shared channel or PDSCH), uplink (UL) resource grant/assignment information (e.g., resource allocations for the physical uplink shared channel or PUSCH), transmit power control information, and/or other types of DCI. An LTE or LTE-A base station may designate a PDCCH format according to its DCI information, which can be directed at a single wireless communication device or to multiple wireless communication devices located within the same cell. For instance, PDCCH DCI may be associated with a cell radio network temporary identifier (C-RNTI) directed at a single wireless communication device, or alternatively, PDCCH DCI may be associated with a paging RNTI (P-RNTI) or a system RNTI (S-RNTI) directed at a group of wireless communication devices located within the same cell.
LTE carriers often require a wireless communication device to perform blind decoding of the PDCCH to attempt to locate DCI intended for the wireless communication device (e.g., for the specific wireless communication device and/or for a group of wireless communication devices operating within the same network cell, the group including the wireless communication device), such as may be indicated by an RNTI designation. For example, a wireless communication device may be required to perform blind decoding in scenarios where the wireless communication device is unaware of a carrier's particular PDCCH control channel structure. The PDCCH control channel structure can include a particular number of PDCCH control channels and a number of control channel elements (CCEs) to which each control channel is mapped. Blind decoding of the PDCCH by a wireless communication device can be particularly costly in terms of the consumption of device resources, such as battery power, processor and memory resources, and the like. This resource consumption by the wireless communication device can be particularly costly when the device performs unnecessary PDCCH searches and/or when the PDCCH otherwise does not include a downlink assignment for the wireless communication device, particularly when the device is engaged in low-bandwidth, periodic communications, such as voice over LTE (VoLTE) communications that could otherwise allow the device to operate in a reduced power consumption state (e.g., in a sleep mode). In this regard, not only does the blind decoding of the PDCCH itself consume resources, but the time required to adapt physical layer processes, such as channel estimation, time tracking, and frequency tracking, used to support PDCCH decoding can impact the amount of time that the device performs hardware/software processing during PDCCH monitoring. Therefore, improvements to parallelize adaptive physical layer processes with PDCCH decoding to provide for the device to enter more quickly a reduced power consumption state between PDCCH decoding periods are desired.